Fighting Back: One Girl's Mission to End Cyberbullying

When Savannah Dietrich was sexually abused at a party, her friends shockingly rallied around the guy who did it. It's happening all over, and it needs to end now.

By
Abigail Pesta

Jun 04, 2013

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Savannah Dietrich woke up with an ominous feeling. Her bra was out of kilter, her underwear off. The 16-year-old had spent the previous night, a lazy August evening in 2011, hanging out with friends at her father's house in Louisville, Kentucky, while he was away for work. Beer, vodka, and whiskey had been flowing. Dietrich had downed shots with two boys she knew casually, Will Frey and Austin Zehnder, both solid students and lacrosse players at Trinity, a prestigious Catholic school for boys. At some point, she had passed out. The last thing she remembers clearly is eating pizza rolls on the back porch.

As she lay in bed the following morning, she says, "I felt this complete uneasiness. But I was in denial. I forced myself to believe nothing bad had happened."

What Dietrich didn't know: The boys, both 16 at the time, had removed her bra and underwear and sexually abused her while she lay unconscious on the kitchen floor. (Dietrich asked Cosmopolitan not to divulge details of the abuse.) They had taken cell-phone pictures. And they were showing them to friends.

Dietrich remained in the dark for months, while her supposed friends snickered about the photos in school hallways. When she finally learned the truth, she says, "I felt like a toy, a sex toy, like I was put into a pornographic image against my will." And then she faced a new kind of assault: Friends of the boys—and some of her own friends—made a blizzard of cruel accusations on Facebook and in person. "They said I was drunk and making dumb decisions," says Dietrich, now 18. "They said I was a slut. They were trying to say I had consented. I was being called a liar."

But Dietrich didn't take it. She collected evidence and called the police. Her case would ignite a legal battle in which she would be accused of contempt of court for tweeting about the crime, defying a court order to stay silent. And as stories eerily similar to hers erupted across the national news, this petite, sandy-haired teenager began to feel she needed to speak out in support of all targets of sexual assault and social-media assault.

Dietrich picked a fight in a particularly toxic modern frontier, the place where retro attitudes about sexual assault in America intersect with sophisticated technology. Blaming the victim existed long before cell-phone cameras, but new technologies make it "much easier to intimidate and harass someone," says Jennifer Gentile Long, a former prosecutor and director of AEquitas, a women's legal advocacy group in Washington, D.C. For victims, there's a sense of losing control because photos, rumors, and other attacks spread at the speed of light. Technology becomes a powerful weapon for bullies, pushing invasion of privacy to a new level.

The consequences can be tragic. In Northern California this April, three boys were arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting and photographing 15-year-old Audrie Pott when she passed out at a party. Pott hanged herself after classmates saw the photos, according to her parents. In Canada, authorities in Nova Scotia recently reopened the case of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons. Four boys allegedly raped and photographed her in late 2011 while she was at a house party. Parsons hanged herself this past April amid relentless online bullying, with peers calling her a slut, her family says. And most notoriously, in Steubenville, Ohio, last August, two high school football players raped a passed-out 16-year-old girl during a night of partying. Onlookers documented the scene with tweets, photos, and videos. In one, a male partygoer laughed about the victim, saying, "She is so raped right now."

Each case is more disturbing than the last. Yet, Long says, it could be that there is a silver lining to technology's role in rape. Photos and tweets can be used as evidence, as was the case in Steubenville. And as horrible as rape bullying is to witness, says Long, "it's unmasking for the public what's really going on—how these crimes are perpetrated and who the perpetrators are."

Things Get Bad

Before the night of the crime, Dietrich had a tumultuous sophomore year. She had transferred to a public school from a private one that her divorced mother and father—a web developer and construction foreman, respectively—could no longer afford. She struggled to fit into the new scene. "I've always wanted people to like me, to be in the popular crowd," she says. She hung out with her old private-school pals, meeting up at house parties and along the banks of the Ohio River. She also had a boyfriend, who went to another private school for boys.

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In the weeks after that lost August night, she noticed that some of her friends seemed distant, treating her "like an untouchable," she says. "I thought it was weird that a lot of friends, especially some of my very best guy friends, just stopped talking to me. It really hurt."

In late November, she finally got a tip-off. A male friend said he had heard rumors that there were naked photos of her. Dietrich said the gossip couldn't be true—she had never posed for anyone. Then her thoughts raced back to that morning after her house party. Suddenly, she says, "I felt exposed and humiliated. It's my body that's out there. I should have the right to show people my own body."

"Thanks for ruining my life," she texted Frey.

Then, to Zehnder: "I need to talk to you…I have not stopped crying since I heard."

After a flurry of texts, both boys admitted to photographing her, but they kept the details fuzzy. So Dietrich launched an investigation, texting people she knew. Several, including two close female friends, told her they had seen photos on one of the boys' phones. They had told the boys to delete the photos but didn't inform Dietrich at the time because, she says, "they thought they were protecting me. They were embarrassed for me."

Eventually, she realized there had been both nudity and abuse. She saved the texts as evidence. Then she geared up to tell her parents and the police. A few friends stuck by her, as did her boyfriend, but others attacked. "They were like, 'This was all just a stupid mistake,'" she says. "They saw me as being overdramatic."

As the backlash grew, Dietrich cried constantly. "At night, I closed my eyes and imagined the photos," she says with a slight Kentucky lilt. "My breasts being exposed, that's one degree; my vagina, that's a whole different level. It's too private. This is my body, my sanctuary, me—and people were laughing at it." She pauses, then adds, "I felt so betrayed. Out of everyone who saw the photos, not one person told me—this was such a big thing for me. I honestly wanted to kill myself."

Why Would Anyone Gang Up on a Victim?

Both sexes often hold antiquated notions about the crime, says Katherine Hull, spokesperson for the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. People think women invite rape by wearing skimpy clothes or drinking. And many people don't realize, or don't want to believe, that most sexual assaults—an estimated two-thirds—are committed by someone the victim knows.

It makes people feel unsafe to believe that a man in their social circle could be capable of such crimes, says clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair, EdD, author of The Big Disconnect. "It's like you have a predator in your family, [especially if the accused is] someone you've grown up with since kindergarten."

Dietrich thinks that was the root of the backlash she faced. "It's a lot easier to call the girl a slut than to believe the guys are that messed up," she says. "These are people you eat lunch with, you party with—you don't want to see them in that light."

There's also a gang mentality. "If you gang up on someone else, you think it won't happen to you," says Steiner-Adair, adding, "it's cool to be cruel online—the more you can humiliate someone, the more social capital you get." And victim-blamers are finding many uses for technology. When British soccer player Ched Evans was convicted of rape last year, nine people were fined by the court for outing the victim on Facebook and Twitter, one reportedly calling her a "money-grabbing slut." In Brooklyn last December, when a man went on trial for sexually abusing a girl in his Orthodox Jewish community, four men took photos of the victim on the witness stand, drawing charges of criminal contempt.

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Colleges—with their high rates of both social media and sexual assault—can be a particular minefield. And women say that campus officials aren't always on their side when things blow up. Students have filed complaints with the Department of Education against a rash of schools—most recently, Occidental, Swarthmore, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—alleging poor treatment of women who report sexual assault. In New Hampshire, after students at Dartmouth staged a protest about campus sexual assault and other problems, they reportedly received anonymous online threats of rape.

Finally, Taking Action

Dietrick contacted the police in late December 2011, after breaking the news of the crime to her mother. It's not a conversation Dietrich looked forward to, she says, but she knew her mom would support her.

Two months later, both boys confessed to abusing and photographing Dietrich. Legal records show that when the detective asked Zehnder why the boys had done it, he said, "At the time, we were probably not in the best state of mind and thought it was funny, I guess." (Through his attorney, Zehnder declined to comment. Frey's attorney didn't respond.) The boys were charged with sexual abuse in the first degree, which is a felony, and voyeurism, a misdemeanor. The prosecutor offered a plea deal—50 hours of community service plus counseling, and when the perpetrators reached age 19½, their records could be cleared.

Dietrich felt the deal was a slap on the wrist and says the prosecutor, Paul Richwalsky, had not told her the details in advance. (He denied that claim and declined to comment here.) Dietrich would later suspect Richwalsky was biased: Turns out, he was a graduate and booster of Trinity, the same school the boys went to. Things heated up at a hearing in June, when a judge told the room that juvenile-court proceedings should not be discussed outside the court. Then she took an extra step, indicating that the crime itself should not be discussed. No one should "speak about the incident to anyone for any reason," she said, according to court files. "No one is to talk or type anything." Dietrich felt like she was being bullied all over again, this time by the court. She fired off 10 furious tweets. "Will Frey and Austin Zehnder sexually assaulted me," read one. "There you go, lock me up. I'm not protecting anyone that made my life a living hell."

The next day, the boys' lawyers filed a motion to hold Dietrich in contempt of court. The charge meant she could face jail time. The boys would not.

The primary judge on the case, Angela McCormick Bisig, had been away the day the controversial order of silence was issued by another judge. Today, Bisig explains that juvenile courts in Kentucky keep legal proceedings confidential because "we want young [offenders] to be able to reform themselves without a lot of public scrutiny." However, Dietrich should have been allowed to discuss the crime itself, says Bisig, now a circuit-court judge. "We cannot tell a young crime victim that they cannot tell their personal story."

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When news of the squall got out, Dietrich finally got some backup, with supporters flooding her Facebook page. The contempt motion was dropped, and at Dietrich's request—and despite objections from the boys—the court records were opened to the public.

Making a Change

The public is increasingly getting involved in cases of rape bullying. In both the Steubenville and Canada cases, the hacker group Anonymous stepped in, digging up online evidence of the crimes. The hackers "have played an important role in driving home the need for police to take these cases seriously, no matter what you think of their tactics," says Liesl Gerntholtz, director of the women's rights division at Human Rights Watch.

But the real key to change, experts say, is education. Schools around the country are launching "social and emotional intelligence" classes as early as the fourth grade. "We have to give kids new tools," Steiner-Adair says. "Kids are growing up profoundly removed from experiencing something in the moment—things don't exist until they're posted online." In a program in Detroit, the city's top prosecutor, Kym Worthy, meets with teenagers to discuss sexual assault before they get to college.

The legal system could benefit from some schooling too, says Long. Many courts are "just beginning to understand the breadth of intimidation," she says. "Some people in the justice system are not that familiar with social media. They might not understand the technology, what it means to post on a Wall."

The family of Audrie Pott has begun pushing for Audrie's Law. It would, among other things, call for juvenile assailants who distribute photos of the victim to be tried in adult court, which would not protect their identities. Ed Vasquez, a family spokesman, says there needs to be "public punishment for crimes where the suspects publicly intimidate and humiliate their victims."

Determining when rape bullying becomes criminal behavior depends on the case, says Gabe Rottman, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. But in general, he says, there's a difference between saying "I don't like you" (protected free speech) and "I'm going to hurt you" (potentially illegal). In Steubenville, two girls were charged with menacing behavior after making online threats, and a grand jury is weighing charges against others. After the death of Rehtaeh Parsons, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper argued that it's time to stop using the term bullying to describe online harassment. "What we are dealing with in some of these circumstances," he said, "is simply criminal activity."

Moving On

In the end, Dietrich's assailants got a stiffer sentence. Under their final deal, the felony can be changed to a misdemeanor after three years but not expunged. Jefferson County Attorney Mike O'Connell says the penalties were "the most severe that could be levied in Kentucky Juvenile Court."

The photos still haunt Dietrich. She wishes she could see them and "stop wondering what image of me people have in their minds." But the police say the photos had been deleted by the time they got the phones.

She briefly saw a therapist but doesn't feel she needs one now. "I'm focusing on the positive," she says, which includes plans to attend the University of Louisville in the fall, maybe studying crime and psychology. "I like getting inside people's heads to figure out why they do what they do," she says.

Her personality has changed: She is more serious but also more confident. And she has a new ability to see the big picture. "There will always be people who aren't on your side," she says. She hopes her story will inspire other girls to stand up for themselves when peers attack. Some friends have supported her, she says, but others ignore her when they cross paths. "It hurts," she says, "but I'll become stronger. One day, they'll know what they did was wrong. They'll have daughters. They'll realize, 'I shouldn't have bullied that girl.' They're immature. I had to grow up real fast."

Here are five ways you can help fight back:

CALL 911 OR 800-656-HOPE The hotline of the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network can help if someone sexually assaults you. Or chat online at RAINN.org. Preserve DNA evidence and get medical attention, even if some time has passed.

SAVE THE ONLINE EVIDENCE If you experience harassment after a sexual assault, print things out, or take screenshots; online posts and sites can disappear. Call the police, and find a counselor through the RAINN hotline.

DON'T JUST STAND BY Take action if you witness an online attack, says attorney Jennifer Gentile Long. "Cyberbullying is often a euphemism for stalking, abuse, intimidation, and obstruction of justice, which are serious crimes." Document the behavior, and assure the target you'll testify for her if she reports it.

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START A CAMPUS CAMPAIGNSaferCampus.org offers workshops that will help you push for stronger sexual-assault policies at your college.

SUPPORT AUDRIE'S LAW Learn about the proposed law to toughen penalties for sexual and social-media assault at AudriePottFoundation.com.